I’m
uncertain if the title of Alice,
Sweet Alice
was intended to be ironic, or if the movie was named by marketing
people who’d never actually seen it. Given that the original title
was Confession,
I find the latter explanation more plausible. The movie was
re-released two years after its initial premiere to cash in on Brooke
Shields' popularity.
Shields
plays Karen, the younger sister of the eponymous Alice (Paula
Shepard). Karen is better behaved, and the favorite. Alice, feeling
unloved, acts out, stealing from Karen and generally being a little
bitch. Then, Karen is killed at her first communion and Alice is
found with her veil, leading to the suspicion that Alice is the
killer. It certainly doesn’t help her case that her hated aunt is
then attacked by someone in a raincoat and a mask identical to a mask
Alice wore earlier in the film to scare her sister.
It’s
a bit difficult to pin down the exact protagonist of the film. A
great deal of screen time is given to Alice, but we’re never given
a great deal of insight into her mind. We also see her parents
(Niles McCaster and Linda Miller) and the police trying to understand
what’s going on.
The
fact that Alice is innocent is a foregone conclusion. She’s
clearly a red herring, and who the actual murderer is seems largely
unimportant to me. The movie is an exercise in empathy, intended to
make you feel as miserable as possible for all of the characters.
Everyone speaks slowly with many sighs, unless they are yelling.
Alice creates havoc wherever she goes. Hell, they make the landlord
(Alphonso DeNoble) a fat pedophile just in case a murdered child
wasn’t sufficient.
We
are led for a while to believe that Alice is insane. Under a lie
detector, test it comes out that she believes her sister attacked her
aunt. She clearly believes that Karen is punishing her from beyond
the grave. Whether that punishment is for being a bully, or being a
murderer is the real question.
This
movie is indeed extremely scary, but it’s quite difficult to pin
down why. The attacks themselves? The death of a child? The threat
of Alice being institutionalized? The fat pedophile? In general
they all seem to combine into a sense that the universe is a
miserable place to live in, and life is nothing but suffering.
The
final shot of the movie seems to imply that Alice, while not guilty
of the murder of her sister, is in fact destined to become a murderer
herself anyway. She’s shown with the knife of the killer, which
she conceals in a shopping bag, and examines with a resolved face.
So,
life sucks, and then you become a murderer. There is no escaping,
and there is no happy ending. The movie's constant use of religious
imagery against such a tragic story underscores this idea, with
religion serving merely to help these poor, deluded fools move on
with their lives. The killer, before being taken away by the police,
demands communion, and stabs the priest when he refuses to give it to
her. The movie could almost be called Lovecraftian thematically,
even lacking any supernatural elements.
The
movie, while cheap, is effective. It feels a bit assembly-line, as
if the director wasn't so much telling a story as designing a product
specifically to manipulate the emotions of his audience. That said
though, it worked. So, yes, this movie is definitely worth checking
out.
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